1 hour ago, Smithy said:It may be that I adopted Judy Rodgers' idiom without realizing she'd pulled a Humpty Dumpty on us.
In Simple French Food (1974), on p 266, Richard Olney said, “An onion panade is surely the ancestor and still the best of all the onion soups.” Being Richard Olney, he has more to say and includes a recipe for onion panade. Here’s a bit:
Quote…Many French peasants still begin every meal with a great tureen half filled with dried crusts of bread over which is poured a boiling broth. And a pot-au-feu, a garbure, a bouillabaisse, or an onion soup without crusts of dried bread is unthinkable. But the mere presence of bread in a soup does not constitute a genuine panade, which for most of the French, is but a memory and, for many a detested one, recalling the boiled bread and water on which, as children, they were nourished of an evening.
Soup panades have mostly disappeared from today’s cookbooks. One, however (a curiosity published in 1907, entitled Menus Propos sur la Cuisine Comtoise and signed “Une Vieille Maîtresse de Maison” with no further attempt at identity), after attributing the extreme longevity of the author’s grandfather to the daily consumption of panade and the local wine, contains a detailed exposé of the art of making a perfect panade. It is described as “the best, the cheapest, and the most digestible of all soups.” Its preparation consists of pouring boiling water into an earthenware vessel filled with slices of dried-out bread, simmering for at least an hour and a half and, shortly before serving, stirring in a piece of butter. The secret to its success lies in not stirring it until that point. This, the primordial version, I have tried and I cannot claim to have been ravished by the result. Others, but slightly more elaborated, are sound and succulent fare. The Périgord peasants replace the water by a stout and richly saffron-flavored chicken broth—only enough to be completely absorbed by the swelling bread—and leave it undisturbed, but for an occasional and slight addition of boiling broth, in a gentle oven for an hour or so. It is delicious and they call it mourtairol….
Edited to add that in 2005, @russ parsons wrote this about Olney's recipe in an LA Times piece about favorite cookbooks:
QuoteWant to know why Richard Olney’s “Simple French Food” is my favorite cookbook? Read the recipes -- the one for onion panade, for example. In fact, just read the first sentence: “Cook the onions, lightly salted, in the butter over a very low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour, keeping them covered for the first 40 minutes.”
In that one brief passage, we get three cooking lessons: Salt the onions from the start to help draw out the moisture so the onions wilt faster. Start them in a cold pan so they melt without scorching. And cover the pan early on to trap the heat, helping retain moisture and keeping the onions from browning.
Even better, the dish is a total knockout. It’s like a transcendent French onion soup -- deeply aromatic, nearly custardy, with a stunning gratineed cap. All this comes from only the humblest ingredients. No fancy foodstuffs, no expensive equipment and no tricky techniques. With Olney’s cuisine, time and care are all that are required to work miracles. There is no more important lesson for a cook to learn than that.
